Massive Open Online Courses

Excerpt

The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) is one of the world’s leading universities in computer science education. Starting from 2014’s winter term, Georgia Tech is providing a Master’s program in Computer Science. Individual courses are offered exclusively as “massive open online courses” (MOOCs). ¹ The tuition fees will cover only a fraction of the traditional Master’s program in order to enhance accessibility. To realize this project, Georgia Tech is cooperating with AT&T and the private educational organization Udacity. ² AT&T supports the program with 2 million USD. The telecommunication company uses the program for educating its own members of staff as well as for recruiting highly skilled graduates. With MOOCs for up to 300,000 participants, Udacity has gained global media attraction. Top German universities, e.g., Freiburg, Munich, and Berlin, have already started to accept some Udacity-MOOCs in their regular curricula. ³ As a consequence, MOOCs are increasingly challenging traditional teaching methods and institutions (Vardi 2012). …